developers handle design, not finances. Microtransactions have always been in the interest of profit, not to make the games better. They were the markets compromise with gamers being unlikely to pay enough to cover costs of a Triple A development cycle.
Reminder that when the NES came out, it was still $60 dollars for a game, which would be about $180 today. And that’s not accounting for all the extra manhours that now go into the major titles. Microtransactions and DLCs are the deal with the devil we made to keep games from being $200+ a pop
Games are so damn cheap. It’s insane how cheap games are now. Final Fantasy XVI is going for 50 bucks on Steam and that’s an expensive release. Yesterday I bought several Disgaea games for like ten bucks each and those are a good hundred hours a pop. The top seller list on Steam right now includes multiple games cheaper than 20 bucks. And that’s not even counting all the free to play stuff and the constant sales.
There are great looking and playing games out there that cost less than a movie ticket and a bucket of popcorn. I had to save for six months to get a game when I was a teenager.
Reminder that the amount of gamers worldwide has exploded since the NES came out. There is now upward of 3 billion active gamers. I guarantee you inflation grew at a slower rate.
two business partners are chatting and one says, “We’re losing money on every sale”, so the other one responds, “Yea, but we’ll make it up in volume!”
As long as whales keep buying stuff they’ll keep putting microtransactions in games. Start making fun of people that buy skins and horse armor and maybe people will stop buying shit that has no value.
Yes, blame the victims, that always works well.
Microtransactions exploit the fact that some people have addictive tendencies. You won’t “fix” that by making fun of those people.
Which one will happen first:
-
us fed government regulates an industry for benefit of consumer
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every whale goes broke into poverty…
Asking for a friend
Except the big money isn’t coming from the whales. It’s coming from the gamer equivalent of the little old lady at the casino with her bucket of quarters.
So the answer is neither.
Whales are largely a myth created by game companies to create a false class war amongst us rather than holding the truly responsible parties at fault. No different than pitting the middle class against the poor.
Do whales exist? Absolutely. However, the vast majority of mtx money comes from people with addiction problems, mental health issues that make fiscal responsibility difficult, and kids who don’t know any better. Many of whom who are spending money that they can’t afford to spend but can’t help themselves from spending.
These companies quite literally hire psychologists to tell them exactly how to exploit people’s own brain chemistry against them to most effectively extract money from their wallets. Epic Games got in trouble because it was believed that they were trying to create a culture in Fornite that shamed kids for having default skins. Everything from daily login bonuses to seasons and battle passes to rotating stores are designed to keep you logging in and playing and therefore paying. They turn logging in into a habit and then hit you with the FOMO and completing your collection needs.
You’re not going to fix this by shaming people any more than you can cure drug, alcohol, and gambling addiction by shaming people.
The term “whale” just implies a big spender, it doesn’t exlude gambling addicts, dumb children or the fiscally irresponsable.
But when people think “whale,” they think of the rich idiots with more money than sense. They don’t think of the addict being fleeced like kids by cigarette companies. And we need to change that mentality. Because we’re just victim blaming here. You can’t shame a heroin addict into a sober person.
horse armor
OG gamers remember how this all started. We got what the whales deserve.
It gave your horse extra health actually, so not purely cosmetic. But I think in a single player game that also has extremely good modding tools, it doesn’t really matter. If you want to pay to win your single player game, you do you.
Horse armour was mostly a landmark for showing companies that consumers were willing to pay for micro stuff like that. The potential return vs effort invested was crazy. Todd himself said that they try doing nice DLC that gives you good value for your money, but it’s hard to justify business-wise when the horse armour is so cheap to make and sells so well.
Horse armor came out in 2006. Micro transactions started in 2002 with Maple Story. Plenty of other games had micro transactions by then. Horse armor was a peak when Microsoft drove too hard and consumers pushed back- it was far from the start.
It didn’t start with horse armor. And even then, while clearly stupid, it wasn’t egregious in the way modern mtx is. It was just a poorly priced optional cosmetic DLC. Modern mtx is a whole other beast, where companies use every psychological trick in the book to get people addicted to gambling.
Horse armor was not cosmetic. It was armor.
Otherwise, spot-on. At least people who paid for horse armor got a whole new file for something that was not already in the damn game. Nowadays you’re already looking at the thing, and you’re getting gouged for the ability to say you have it.
Start making fun of people that buy skins and horse armor and maybe people will stop buying shit that has no value.
The Team Fortress / CS:GO model of microtransactions was the least offensive and honestly not much different than the pastiche upgrades you could get before DLC, via “Special Edition” game releases and other gimmicks.
Even then, what’s obnoxious about modern gaming is the endless injection of ads. Compare Diablo 4 and Baldur’s Gate 3, and one of the first things that jump out at you is how much more BG3 is a game and D4 is just a grind that demands more and more of your money. Meanwhile, with the exception of an artbook and soundtrack, what you see with BG3 is what you get. They even tacked on incremental improvements after release that weren’t bundled as nickle-and-dime add-ons.
And look who made more money? It was a tie!
I don’t think you can strictly shame Microsoft/Blizzard/Activison at this point, because the current C-level staff can get caught in the middle of a serial sexual harassment scandal and still just shrug it off. I don’t think you can influence them with your wallet, either, because their model appears to work well-enough (even Diablo Immortal brought in half a billion dollars, and that game sucked shit) relative to BG3 which brought in slightly over $650M.
I think, at some point, you just have to ignore these games at a personal level and satisfy yourself with the knowledge that a dozen or so high quality games get released every year, even if they’re swimming in a sea of hundreds of crappy freemium over-promoted titles. Don’t worry about the Whales. Just focus on what’s good.
Unfortunately, the success of Grand Theft Auto Online will cause corporate execs to forever ignore all your good points.
GTA’s been downhill since it stopped being a top-down sprite game.
Retvrn 2 Tradition
at some point you just have to ignore these games at a personal level and satisfy yourself with the knowledge that a dozen or so high quality games get released every year, even if they’re swimming in a sea of hundreds of crappy freemium over-promoted titles. Don’t worry about the Whales. Just focus on what’s good.
agreed. I focus on my personal happiness rather than thinking i can change the industry somehow through my purchases. I just focus on my own pride as a gamer and human being and not paying companies who don’t respect me or my time. Then instead of being frustrated by the fact 20 years of ‘voting with my wallet’ didn’t work, i am filled with calm satisfaction at not being taken for yet another ride. and shit, its not like i’m denying myself here… there are so many games.
And look who made more money? It was a tie!
Was it? There’s a very recent infographic from Larian, and if you cross reference one or two of those stats against achievement data, it looks like they maybe sold about 10M copies. That’s lower than I was expecting, but that’s what my math says. Not only did Diablo IV sell more copies at the same price, but there were also more opportunities for them to sell post-launch stuff in Diablo.
The estimates I saw were around $650M for each. Maybe that doesn’t count post-launch DLC.
It’s also raw revenue rather than net profit (I guarantee Blizzard had an advertising budget orders of magnitude larger than Larian) so it’s very possible Larian kept more of what it made.
They are in the same ballpark in terms of successful game making, however you slice it. Both could make an argument for why their model of development worked and why this proves doing things their way is the best method for making money.
Star Citizen has a $48,000 package BECAUSE PEOPLE ASKED FOR IT!
They didn’t just decide to do that. There are actually people that said “I want to buy everything you have but I don’t want to have to add one item at a time…” You can only access that package if you’ve already spent over 1k I believe.
There were even content creators that didn’t want to reveal the identity of their viewers, but said they’ve played with people that have spent $100k… I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve watched one of them enough to get a feel for their personality and they don’t seem like to type to make that up.
There are too many people who have way too much money and don’t care. Games with aggressive monetization aren’t going anywhere but the same is true for games made by passionate devs who care about making a good game. Anyone complaining all games are soulless cash grabs isn’t giving smaller indie devs a chance.
100 people see dumb ad.
40 people click on dumb ad.
10 people play game from dumb ad.
5 people stick it out and continue playing.
1 of those 5 spends money.
Games that are p2w exist in a symbiotic relationship with people who are willing to spend copious amounts of money. The people who don’t spend money and still exist within these games help fill in the environment. ALL players of these games are the problem.
Mobile games are the most common example of this, though other games fall under similar banners. The truth is any free game with live service needs money to operate. Hell, even that fan-run DBZ MMO has costs associated with it that the community helps fund. This won’t go away, it’ll just disguise itself as something else.
I do believe, however, that for larger games the bloated cost of development needs to fuck right off. 100mil and 5 years or more? There is a logistical issue there that needs to be addressed. One of many, I’m afraid.
the 10% that said they do? The CEOs
TF2 and it’s consequences have been a disaster for humanity
Ban the entire business model. It’s neither a product nor a service - it’s a scam. Games make you value arbitrary worthless nonsense. That’s what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching real-world prices to that charade.
‘Oh, but if it’s only cosmetic…’ Y’mean proof that people can be made to want stuff, even if it doesn’t do anything? Entire games exist to funnel people toward emotional response, and some of them make billions. Saying ‘it’s just hats’ is the opposite of a defense.
I’m not-buying-it as hard as I can, and hey guess what? It’s still swallowing the entire industry. It is half the revenue and growing. This abuse is so easy and risk-free that it’s in full-priced, major-franchise, single-player titles. Nobody cares that ignoring the in-game advertisements is feasible. They’re still there, nagging at every player, reminding them there’s a better version of the game if they just open up their wallets and look the other way.
We were never going to shop our way out of this. It is greed exploiting human irrationality. The only real solution is to make companies just sell games. You want recurring fees, publishers? That’s called a subscription. People don’t throw as much money at those? Wow, you don’t say. It’s almost like rational spending decisions look nothing like what this business model sucks out of people.
It’s still swallowing the entire industry
No, it’s not. There’s phenomenal indie games out there. Hades 2, Elfen Ring DLC and Black Myth Wukong are just some of the latest games I’m having a blast with, and then theres still rimworld, factorio, timberborn, CK3, Dead by Daylight … The list goes on. None of those games has Ads for ingame purchases (except DbD) and all of them are phenomenal.
None of them are AAA,truey, but idc. Theres so many fun games out there that idc what ubisoft, EA, Activision or other shit companies release.
I think iPhones are overpriced garbage, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned - I just don’t buy it. I bought a used pixel 6, installed graphen, done.
I think casinos are stupid and a waste of money, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned. I just don’t go there.
I think Microsoft, google and Amazon are terrible companies, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned. I just don’t use their products and services.
Making a change starts with yourself. If you don’t buy their stuff, great - still plenty of great games out there.